Wow, I sure saw a lot of movies this year, didn’t I? After Narnia, I’d seen five of the weekend’s top ten movies… Clearly, I need to get back to work!   For your convenience, here’s a quick run-down of the movies I saw, with links to the individual posts where available.

• Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy (in May; mini-review: bit of a mess)
• Star Wars: Revenge of the Sith (in June; mini-review: really well done)
• Fighter Pilot: Operation Red Flag (in June; IMAX 3D; mini-review: excellent!)
• Mr. & Mrs. Smith (in July)
• Batman Begins (in August)
• (September in London — no movies there)
• Serenity (in October)
• Wallace & Gromit in The Curse of the Were-Rabbit (in October)
• Magnificent Desolation: Walking on the Moon (in November)
• Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire (in November)
• Rent (in November)
• Syriana (in December)
• Aeon Flux (in December
• Chronicles of Narnia (in December)
• Polar Express (in December; IMAX 3D; great family movie, in 3D!)

It’s Christmastime, and my silly little gift to you folks is a new Stanforth.org site banner; the old banner has gotten quite stale since its original debut in June 2004. Even better, the new site banner uses the Flickr API to pull images so it’s guaranteed to be updated more often now. I’ve also made other minor cosmetic changes, like switching to a newer RSS icon instead of the old XML icon and updating the About pages a bit— stuff you probably don’t care about but which hopefully makes the site seem a little more orderly overall. Of course, if I’ve broken anything in the process, please let me know.

This also means I can finally retire the old banner, which was a great reminder to me of my most fun UK trip ever, in December 2003. The images feature… let’s see… the beautiful Moments restaurant at the Langham Hotel… Admiralty Arch between the Mall and Trafalgar Square… Tower Bridge… the Tower of London… Big Ben… Virgin Atlantic 008 at Heathrow… and a scene overlooking Kensington Gardens. I’ve also used more recent UK photos for the new banner premiere, and you can click the images to bring up the Flickr page with all the photo descriptions. Neat, huh?  

And with that, ladies and gentlemen, I’m headed out the door to the Central Coast for Christmas with family… Take care, have a safe Christmas weekend, and Happy Holidays!

BBC News reports that "John Spencer, the actor who plays vice-presidential candidate Leo McGarry in NBC television’s The West Wing, has died of a heart attack at 58." Very sad news— and only 58! Much too young. While cast, crew, and fans mourn the loss of a good actor and, by all accounts, a good guy, we’re also of course curious how the show will deal with his loss. It looked like he was leaving the show a year ago when his character suffered a heart attack and was replaced as White House Chief of Staff, but instead, they brought him back as a VP candidate for another go. Some of us suspected that Leo (the character) would either be largely missing after the election — he joked in the last episode about the vice presidency just being honorific — or that he’d have another heart attack if the ratings gods deigned it so. Of course, none of us guessed it would happen for real, so suddenly, and that certainly complicates things for the show writers who were supposedly already grappling with the question of who would win the show’s upcoming Presidential election (which, btw, I don’t believe). In fact, I was happy they were finally acknowledging Leo’s incredible talent this past week when Democratic leaders noted he was the best guy to run the Presidential campaign. It’ll definitely be interesting to see how the show writers handle this. Storywise, this isn’t John Ritter dying on a sitcom. […continued]

After much anticipation and excitement, this weekend’s blockbuster answers the age old question: What do you get when you cross The Lion King with The Passion of the Christ, with the magic of Harry Potter (if only Narnia’s train used Platform 9 3/4) and the epic battles of the Lord of the Rings trilogy?? A $67-million opening weekend, apparently. This movie is an excellent and well-done re-make of the classic children’s book, for better and for worse; that is, any of you bothered by the heavy-handed allegory of the book should be just as offended by the movie, unless the spectacular special effects and amazing battles scenes distract you first.   (By the way, speaking of LotR-like battle scenes, did you know C.S. Lewis and his good friend J.R.R. Tolkien were part of the Inklings, a writers’ club that met at a local pub to discuss story ideas? Wow. Can you imagine those sessions??)

Beyond just making a big Hollywood movie, there’s something else this movie gets right— All too often, when movies are made of beloved books, the movie renditions fail to live up to the imagery of long-time fans whose own imaginations initially accompanied their reading. Movies that might have been great on their own get slammed for their failure of imagination. Modern technology provides a great many tools to more accurately render such (literally) fantastic scenes, but along the way, movie-makers usually get lost in the technology and lose the essence of the story. With Narnia, director Andrew Adamson actually hit the perfect balance, staying true to the original story but bringing the full power of modern computer-generated imagery to bear, to excellent effect. And by "staying true," I don’t mean rendering the book page for page; as my friend David pointed out, the opening scenes— the German bombing of London and the children’s subsequent train journey to the English countryside— spoke volumes in just a few quick minutes, and made for a much more entertaining opening than the book’s rather silly opening ("a girl named Polly who lived on a street…"), while still telling the same story. In other words, no "space monkeys." (Eddie Izzard notes Americans always add random new stuff when remaking successful British films.) […continued]

Anyone following this site lately might assume that I watch a lot of movies. Yet somehow, when the Golden Globe nominations were announced, I’d seen exactly one performance from the top eleven movie categories (so, one out of 55 nominated performances). Of course, reading the list also reminded me of all the television shows I meant to comment on during the year, so this gives me a perfect opportunity to summarize lots of tv watching in one quick post. (Oh, and refer to the list and to IMDB for the show information because I’m not going to link every show to IMDB here.)

In the Best Drama category, I’m shocked to see Commander In Chief on the list; it further proves that I just don’t get this show. When I watched it, the novelty of a female President wore off in the first 15 minutes, and the show became tired and poorly acted and poorly written (especially the plots about the kids and husband) and nowhere near as intelligent as The West Wing has consistently been over the years. It absolutely stumps me to see this show here and The West Wing obviously ignored. Grey’s Anatomy was decent first season, but I lost interest this year. Lost was good this year, but not as good as first season. Rome was an interesting and somewhat bizarre show, presenting a fictionalized representation of ancient Rome during the reign of Julius Caesar and ranging from gratuitously scandalous to intermittently interesting and occasionally even educational. It was impressive to recreate that world somewhat accurately, and great attention was paid to costume detail, etc. I didn’t see Prison Break, so I’d probably give it to Lost. Of course, it’ll probably go to Commander In Chief and irritate me even more. […continued]

It’s not often that I’m at a complete loss for words, so you can imagine my shock after seeing this movie, when my friend David and I spent the next hour in complete confusion, trying to puzzle out what could possibly have gone so wrong in the disaster that was Aeon Flux. I’m sure a lot of professional critics will pan this movie, but for chrissakes, we. are. the. eff’ing. demographic. We’re sci-fi geeks. We suspend disbelief almost daily. We liked Tomb Raider, thought it was a fun movie. And while I’m not much of an Angelina Jolie fan, I love Charlize Theron— hell, I’d probably pay $10 to see a movie where she just walks around for two hours. (I still smile remembering the first movie I saw her in, 1996’s Two Days in the Valley, with Charlize and Terri Hatcher in what the LA Times called "the spandex catfight of the year.") Which is to say, Aeon Flux had it made. I wanted to love this movie. It could’ve been the worst critically-reviewed movie of the year and I still would’ve been fawning like a dopey teenager over the amazing Charlize Theron.

So how is it even possible that I completely, utterly hated this movie??

For starters, the first half of the movie was completely disjointed, a casualty of poor editing if nothing else. It felt like watching a very, very long trailer where huge scenes were missing, and the scenes that were left were somewhat irritating too. The covert spies wore clothes that completely stood out. The male actors were almost categorically bad. And even Charlize in risque outfits — you could almost imagine a smarmy studio exec saying "It’s Tomb Raider, but sexier!" — left even dopey-Charlize-fan me wondering why the hell she was wearing such stupid outfits. (Like, her sleepwear just looks ridiculous and uncomfortable and pointless.) By the time they got around to actually evolving the actual storyline (which was a pretty good story, actually, buried somewhere in there), the other actors had mostly fallen apart, the scenes were already confusingly disjointed, and the movie was hopelessly lost. It was missing flow between the scenes. This movie is so bad that I may never see another MTV Films production ever again. In fact, at some point in here, I realized an interesting problem with casting a serious actress for this role— the movie is bad, but she takes it so seriously that it’s not even laughably bad, just plain tediously bad. […continued]

There’s actually important stuff going on with me these days (like, "brain scans" type important), but I’m also taking the time to see a few movies while they’re in theaters. It’s hardly surprising that Syriana ranked high on this list, given that I majored in international relations and Middle East foreign policy studies at UCLA, and as a result, you can imagine how critical I am of movies in this genre. I mean, c’mon, Clooney’s doing a Middle East movie? With Matt Damon? That’s practically a setup for Oceans Thirteen in Dubai. That said, I knew this was a Participant production, and sure enough, this was a great movie— a serious topic addressed intelligently, with good acting, and only a bit of Hollywood cheese in ways so imperceptible that my calling it that is actually excessively harsh. For example, about halfway through the movie, I caught myself thinking that one of the storylines (about Pakistani immigrants) was a bit unrealistic— and totally stopped in mid-thought, realizing, "Wait, this is a movie." In other words, if this movie were much less fictional, it’d be a documentary in an international relations course rather than a studio release playing in theaters nationwide. The main character is in fact based on a real character, CIA operative Bob Baer who was in fact big in Beirut in the mid-80s as the film alludes. But beyond just educational, the movie was entertaining, well presented, well acted, with a great storyline, and a topic so relevant these days that I had to double-take when I saw this article about "shrapnel from an American-made missile found Sunday at the house where Pakistan said a top al-Qaida operative was killed in an explosion."

My only real question, in properly defining niches so Stanforth.org readers can decide whether my review matters to them, is whether this movie would be generally interesting to a mass American audience. I would guess not, but then again, maybe that’s my elitist "Blue State" arrogance talking. In an interview I saw afterward, writer Stephen Gaghan describes it as a "fill in the blanks" movie where people from each end of the spectrum interpret it through the lens of their pre-existing beliefs. It did strike me at a couple points that they were largely presenting data points, and leaving conclusions up to the audience, though it seemed somewhat obvious to me what the conclusions were. It would be interesting to hear a review from a Red Stater who liked the movie, and one who could explain how this movie fits into their world view. […continued]

Funny, for someone who hasn’t seen many movies this year, I’ve been on a roll this month— five movies in six weeks. And of course, the latest Harry Potter movie was a definite opening-weekend must-see… from one of the few franchises left that warrant such commitment. I was especially curious about this particular movie, after being disappointed by Book Four (on which the movie is of course based). Books One and Two were nice, sweet, and somewhat interesting. Book Three upped the ante significantly— a great book, a much darker storyline with great plot twists, and a really great story overall. After that setup, it’s hardly surprising that Book Four was a bit of a letdown for me. In fact, it was the first book with too much detail; I got distracted and lost interest a few times, and some of the scenes like the maze at the end exceeded my limited sense of imagination and just irritated me.

So, ironically, this movie, while not a great movie even amongst the Harry Potter films, was the first which I liked better than the book version. Cutting the story down to an abridged (and more manageable) few hours, with special effects to render what I apparently couldn’t visualize for myself, and all combined with the fun of a Harry Potter movie, made this movie one of the best of the year, even if not anywhere near as good as the Prisoner of Azkaban was. (Plus, even more fun since my sister took me to see it for my birthday… thanks, kiddo!) In this movie, the recasting of Dumbledore was more obvious; the new Dumbledore just isn’t as good, and it showed. And fans of the book might also be surprised to find that Hermione is prettier than Fleur Delacour through some less-than-magical casting of the latter.

I suspect, though, that for most people, you’re either a Harry Potter fan or you’re not, and so, this is one of the few movies for which movie reviews are almost entirely pointless except for fans to compare notes afterwards. (Or, you can be like my friend David, who didn’t consider it a good movie yet still wants to see the movie in normal, Digital, and IMAX formats just to compare the quality. Almost impressive just to see geekdom trump fandom, isn’t it?   )

I really like niche movies, movies that don’t even bother appealing to the masses, but instead choose a core audience and totally slam-dunk it for them. After nearly a decade on Broadway, Jonathan Larson’s award-winning and beloved musical Rent made it to the big screen this week, and the results were… fantabulous. Sure, most "family values" types will hate this movie; this movie is practically a Red-State campaign commercial about evil Blue-Staters— with needle-sharing drug addicts, strippers, transexuals, and love songs between gay men and between lesbian women, while celebrating squatters fighting landlords and lamenting the growing AIDS crisis of the 1980s. A year in the life of friends. With randomly esoteric references to Pablo Neruda and Gertrude Stein. Yeah, this is definitely a movie with a very specific target audience. […continued]

With the French suburbs rioting this week on a scale rarely seen in modern Western nations, it reminded me once again what unique threats France faces in dealing with its large Muslim population. The New York Times also touched on one of the most important aspects:

While the violence has not taken on religious overtones, most of the young people involved are nominally Muslim, raising fears that Islamist groups could capitalize on the unrest to recruit new members. Internet postings from one such movement encouraged young Muslims elsewhere in Europe to riot in the name of Islam.

"Oh, you Muslim people in Europe, walk with and like your brothers in Paris and learn that these people are dogs," read a message posted on Monday on the popular Web site of a dissident based in London. "Teach them that we are a single nation and if a single member is touched, then all the others will erupt like a burning volcano."

In an essay earlier this year (March 14, 2005), I outlined the underlying issues and suggested a long-term solution; however, the events this week threaten to accelerate the crisis beyond the time required for the solution, while also empowering a reactionary response which may preclude such a long-term solution entirely. I’m sharing that essay here in the hopes that it might provide greater background for anyone trying to better understand the recent turmoil…

The French Connection: How the Global Muslim Insurgency Reframes Cultural Controversies in France

An Italian painting entitled The Hall of Darkness portrays a blindfolded young maiden, carrying a lighted candle, walking down a dark hallway. The candle, of course, illuminates the room, but what the candle reveals, the blindfold conceals, and the maiden continues down the hallway in absolute darkness. Revised with the brush of today’s French zeitgeist, a modern re-rendering might portray the French Marianne, symbol of the Republic, trapped in her own hall of darkness, blindfolded by her quest for post-colonial significance in a world increasingly dominated by American globalization, and stumbling on in darkness, fighting internal ideological battles without recognizing their greater global context. Thus, failing to understand the nature of Islamic culture, the French have framed recent controversies like the foulard affair as local issues of French cultural defense without recognizing their role as flashpoints in a global war between Islam and the West. Just as the superpowers fought proxy battles during the Cold War, France in 2005 is well on its way to becoming a proxy site in the new "global war on terror," a conflict defined outside France which nevertheless has subsumed issues of French cultural defense. To better understand the conflict, we will examine the underlying ideological conflict, the impact of local cultural controversies in perpetuating it, and the imminent threat of global Muslim insurgency connecting with disenfranchised French Muslims. […continued]

Each January, I set new resolutions about things I want to learn during the year, and each December, I marvel at the odd things I learned that would never have made it onto a January list. When the 2005 lists are made, I’m sure that the crash course in psychology (pardon the pun) after the car accident six months ago will top the list. I had no idea that post-tramatic stress disorder was as easy to get as a simple car accident; before, I’d only heard it used in referring to Vietnam war vets and other people with much more significant problems than my minor whinings. As a result of all this, I’ve been hitting some serious focus/energy problems in the past month, which is certainly making my already-over-committed schedule seem absurdly ridiculous. While this is something doctors obviously have to figure out, it’s also had me browsing the web in search of other solutions, no matter how ridiculous they seem, in case that elusive miracle cure is lurking somewhere behind the next set of hyperlinks. (And of course, if you have suggestions, let me know at js.blog at this site… Thanks.) […continued]

George W. Bush named the new Fed Chairman (nominee) today and the market rose 170 points on the news. With the legendary Alan Greenspan retiring after 18+ years, after presiding over one of the greatest economic runs in history, filling his shoes might be the most impossible challenge around… Not since Dorothy’s red slippers have a pair of shoes seemed so magical. But while the markets cheered for Ben Bernanke today, I couldn’t help thinking… Wow, this guy is so screwed.

Some would contend that "markets are always right," but no, sorry, markets are more often stupid, fickle, and myopically money-driven at the expense of long-term success. And investors, like the general electorate, have a bad habit of assigning credit and blame for systemwide phenomena to the nearest publicly-recognizable figure they can find. Presidents are made and broken on the economic climate of the day, something which few Presidents have much control over. Without a doubt, Greenspan helmed the Fed exceptionally well during his tenure, but no one would argue that he alone was responsible for the great successes either. So with this in mind, let’s run with a few assumptions… […continued]

In the closing seconds of The West Wing tonight, Toby Ziegler admits to CJ that it was he who leaked the classified information to the press! Some may remember that I suspected this six months ago and have been more and more convinced of this watching re-runs and discussing with friends. Thanks to all my friends who humored my ranting, and to Dave Winer, Robert DeLaurentis, and others for linking to my random ideas along the way. Of course, this is all just more praise for the brilliant writers of The West Wing… I’ve realized, watching ABC’s Commander-in-Chief lately, how much I’ve taken the West Wing writers for granted in recent years. And once again tonight, they showed us a story where the obvious suspicions pointed to CJ while enough breadcrumbs, backed up by several years of character development, instead implicated Toby. Beyond just good storytelling (which it is), this is what makes The West Wing fun to watch!

I caught an episode of Firefly when it ran on Fox (maybe less than an episode) and wasn’t very impressed. But as I was leaving for England, and knowing I’d have free time to spare without my usual tv shows, my friend David gave me the dvd set and suggested I catch up before Serenity. Wow, am I glad I listened. The show was light and fun, a bit heavy on the cheesy-Western at times but also with great one-liners— pretty ok, but probably not something I would’ve watched regularly (well, not probably— obviously, I didn’t). But the dvd experience (minus commercials, watching several episodes at once if you want, etc) is quite different than normal primetime viewing, and the show was a fun way to pass the time (I watched the two-hour series premiere on the flight there, for example). That said, even I was surprised at the pay-off when watching Serenity.

It’s a challenge to write successful movies based on established tv franchises, because it’s not entirely clear which audience you’re playing to. Write for obsessive Trekkie-type fans, and you’ll flop at the box office when non-fans hate your movie. Write for non-fans, on the other hand, and you’ll offend fans, generate bad publicity, and probably not appeal to the general audience well either. (I mean, at that point, if you’re writing for non-fans, there’s almost no point to building it on an established tv franchise.) With Serenity, Joss Whedon managed to write a movie that was "almost ok" for non-fans (though I imagine huge sections, including some of the action scenes, would seem cheesy and unbelievable) while instead focusing on die-hard fans, giving them the best gift ever— a great big-budget two-hour finale to a tv series. There was so much detail packed into this movie, filling out the back-story and resolving lots of details that didn’t quite make sense in the tv show. In fact, I actually like the tv series better now, having had some of those issues resolved in a really clean, much-more-believable way. And even some of the fight scenes with River Tam (the girl featured on the poster) seem a lot more realistic after, for example, a scene in the tv show where she glances out at soldiers, then fires haphazardly without looking— three shots, three kills. It’s hard to recommend a movie that needs 15 hours of prep time, but if you have the time to spare, Serenity is really a lot of fun, and actually better than I expected it to be. It’s not just another "episode" with big-budget effects, but easily the best written episode of them all too. So a mixed conclusion to my review— I wouldn’t necessarily recommend the movie for most people, but it’s a hell of a lot of fun for those who watch the series first.

Thanks for the great feedback to my earlier question. More than just talking about structure, the feedback really got into what you want to see on the site, with the #1 request of course being "post more often!" All but two of you prefer the separated areas, and I do too; separate areas let me keep prototypical readers in mind and make writing more comfortable for me. Also, one of the outcomes of my recent London meetings is that, starting in November, I’ll be contributing to two new business blogs as well, so that should resolve the site-focus dilemma and give me the freedom to post cat pictures here on my personal blog… (No, I don’t really have a cat.)   A few other random thoughts while I’m at it…

• I want to have more fun with site coding and design. It may seem like a waste of time to most bloggers, but as a software guy, coding is just as much "self-expression" to me as writing is to most bloggers. Besides, when I like the site, I tend to write more often.
• Yeah, I know, I’m bored with my header graphic too. I’m playing with Flickr now, and I’d like to create a header that auto-updates from my uploaded photos. Maybe overlay a PNG alpha transparency for the title?
  
• Jury’s still out on categories and tags… Maybe I’ll experiment and see if del.icio.us tags suit my taste…
• The single-blog ranking issue can probably be solved with Javascript… Cookies are too 1997.
• I’ll setup Trackback and other ways to interact more with other bloggers. Not adding comments though, sorry.
• For those who want a single RSS feed with everything I write, I’ll update the "ALL" feed to including the link feeds too. Yeah, sounds obvious that ALL should’ve included everything all along. Live and learn.

One of my goals for this site, learning from past mistakes, was to give myself separate sections to write to different audiences. And I’ve heard from at least a few readers who seem to like this approach— "I like the segregated areas of your site too," a friend wrote recently, "because honestly, I could care less about all the uber-nerd code mumbo jumbo you get into."  

So I thought I was being clever with my Worldview / Geekview / Codeview sections until a discussion of blog popularity and search engines this weekend with a friend, who pointed out that my "clever" strategy translates into three separate blogs, and leaves nothing at all at the root stanforth.org domain itself. Hmm, yeah, good point. I still have people linking to me thinking my blog is called "Worldview," and still have people linking to the old Tivolution category that no longer exists… alright, yeah, not so clever of me. And while in an ideal world I shouldn’t care about blog popularity or search engines, I’m apparently just a capitalist media whore seeking fame and fortune in this new Web 2.0 AJAXified blogosphere insert-buzzword-here goldrush. So assuming that the Buddhist ego-less enlightenment thing doesn’t kick in anytime soon, how can I restructure the site as a single blog at stanforth.org while still segregating my uber-nerd code mumbo jumbo away from those who could care less? Cookies to specify sections? (But what if they have cookies disabled?) Dynamic AJAXy display? (But then they’d have to choose preferences each time?) Normal categories or tags are nice, but don’t segregate things enough at the level I’m thinking of. Any other suggestions? I’d love to hear them… drop me a note at js.blog, at this site name. (Apologies to whom it may concern for posting this to all categories too…)

From the "hate to say I told you so" files…

The invasion of Iraq was the "greatest strategic disaster in United States history," a retired Army general said yesterday, strengthening an effort in Congress to force an American withdrawal beginning next year. Retired Army Lt. Gen. William Odom, a Vietnam veteran, said the invasion of Iraq alienated America’s Middle East allies, making it harder to prosecute a war against terrorists.

The U.S. should withdraw from Iraq, he said, and reposition its military forces along the Afghan-Pakistani border to capture Osama bin Laden and crush al Qaeda cells.

"The invasion of Iraq I believe will turn out to be the greatest strategic disaster in U.S. history," said Odom, now a scholar with the Hudson Institute.

Ahhh, remember back when it was "unpatriotic" to call this a strategic mistake?

Back in Los Angeles now and, aside from a bit of jetlag, settling back into the daily routine. It’s amazing how disorienting it is to return to the real world after three-plus weeks away. Spending most of the month in England had its ups and downs, but all in all, it was a great time with family, even catching up with relatives I’d never met before. (Some were so amazingly wonderful that they finally taught me the whole point of the close-knit Indian family… something my parents never managed in 30+ years of trying.) I’ve got lots of other random observations after this trip, but I’ll boil it down to just the top few…

For starters, I decided I don’t like the food in England. Not sure why this only dawned on me now, after how many previous trips? For the most part, I had great home-cooked food everywhere we went, but on the rare occasions where I ate out, it really struck me not only how expensive everything was, but how few choices there were. I would’ve paid quite a lot for some of the random, inexpensive food back home that I always take for granted (Baja Fresh and my favorite sandwich and sushi places, for example). And for all the Indian restaurants in London, the five or so I’ve been to all seem slightly off— like they’re not using all the requisite spices for authentic Indian food. This could just be poor selection of restaurants on my part, or it could be quite intentional— the blander anglicized food didn’t smell as strong as authentic Indian food usually does. Perhaps there are 6,000 Indian restaurants in England (2,000 in London alone) precisely because it isn’t quite olfactorily offensive as real Indian food. […continued]

After a week in Cambridge, it was good to get back to London for a few meetings and some light sight-seeing in between. Spent an hour or so sitting on a park bench in Russell Square this afternoon, thinking about the Power of Now and the two years that author Eckhart Tolle spent sitting on a bench right here. Also spent a couple hours at the British Museum around the corner (I could spend a few weeks there and still not see everything), mostly just casually browsing the Egyptian, Greek, and Roman wings this time. After my next meeting, I wandered from Victoria Station back to Piccadilly Circus for a little shopping at Fortnum & Mason, the greatest grocery store in the world (it’s "the Queen’s grocer," after all). All in all, a nice relaxing day in the city, with good food, good meetings, and some fun sight-seeing.

Update: More photos in this Flickr set.

For some reason, as a kid, I was utterly fascinated by England and the monarchy, even sending Her Majesty a birthday card when I was seven or eight. Getting a letter back from Buckingham Palace, wherein a Lady in Waiting had written "at the Queen’s command to thank [me] for the kind birthday wishes [I] sent Her Majesty," was just about the coolest thing ever…   So on this summertime trip to England, there was only one absolute requirement for me, something I hadn’t been able to do during my previous Fall/Winter/Spring trips to London over the years— to tour the State Rooms inside Buck House. (Tours are only allowed during the summer months, when the Queen is elsewhere.) So yesterday, finally, after years of meaning to do this, I got to stand in the presence of the lavish grandeur that is, quite literally, fit for royalty. It really is unbelievable, actually too excessive, even for royalty. I made a comment about finding it hard to believe that people lived here, and a docent corrected me that, "No, they only entertain here," as if their residences were somehow down-market. Yes, poor royals.

While the sheer splendor of the rooms were predictably impressive, there was one reaction I didn’t expect of myself— Staring at a gilded centerpiece that some King had made of his favorite pet dogs, the sheer absurdity somehow reminded me of the Gandhi line, noting how much wealth England had plundered from India to create the higher English standard of living. Hmm, wonder how many millions starved while the King commissioned pet statues in gold? It’s a little surreal, and something that only dawned on me because of how incredibly plush everything there was, far beyond even my own grand expectations of Windsor wealth. Simply stunning, and definitely an experience I’m glad to have. The best tourism is found in the places which video, pictures, and books simply can’t accurately convey; this was certainly one such place.

Update: I’ve posted the full London photo set here. Note that I didn’t take the palace photos because photos aren’t allowed inside.

Those familiar with Birmingham are probably wondering where in the world you could take such beautiful pictures, so I should clarify that I was actually in Sutton Coldfield, a small town about half an hour from Birmingham by train. Birmingham, or what little I saw of it, seems to be a dirty metropolis, something like Pittsburgh or Detroit, certainly nothing like the beautiful area around Sutton Coldfield.

Update: More Sutton Coldfield and wedding photos in this Flickr set. […continued]

Spending the day in Cambridge with my two younger sisters, we decided to go punting on the River Cam (for which the college and city are named), a perfectly touristy thing that I somehow never did in my various previous trips here. It was definitely fun to see the Backs, as they’re called, the backs of the various colleges that collectively comprise Cambridge University. The tour itself lasts just under an hour and gives you a calm and relaxing way to see historic sites dating back to the 1200s. It really is quite amazing to consider how long these colleges have been here, and interesting to hear how traditions have been maintained over 500 years in some cases. Certainly not the atmosphere of UCLA back home.

Update: I’ve moved the Cambridge photos into this Flickr set.

Woke up this morning to the surreal sound of an owl hooting outside the window, in picturesque Linton, a suburb of Cambridge, England. Looking out this upstairs window at the houses around us, I couldn’t help but whistle the Harry Potter theme song, imagining Hedwig would be arriving shortly with the daily mail.

But alas, I am a mere muggle, and just getting here was quite an adventure. Arriving at Heathrow on Tuesday with my mother in a wheelchair and having not slept in almost 24 hours, the decision to rent a car and drive two hours (my first time driving in England at that) was obviously not the smartest. And if I’d realized how ridiculously narrow the village streets were, I would’ve opted for something a bit smaller than the Saab 95 too. So after making it all the way from Heathrow to Linton (five different highways?), I misjudged the turn onto High Street in Linton — about two streets away from our destination — and scraped noisly all the way down the passenger’s side of the car. Whooops! Drove back to Heathrow yesterday to pick up my sister, and paid $70 for half a tank of petrol on the way home as well. Ouch. I’m guessing the two-day rental cost about $1,000 altogether. A few more great reasons I’ve never driven in England before (besides, I’m usually in London where the Tube is amazing and a car is just a liability).

In any case, we’ve somehow made it here in one piece (mostly), and we’re leaving tomorrow by train for my older sister’s wedding in Birmingham. At the end of the day, that’s really all that matters.

Update: More of my Linton photos in this Flickr set.

When I was a kid, Batman was easily the best superhero-- the only superhero that seemed remotely plausible. Batman didn’t arrive in a spaceship from Krypton or get powers from a radioactive spider… No, Batman is just a guy, orphaned by violence and swimming in vengeance, with a cold and lonely darkness you’d never find in Superman, Spiderman, or those other squeaky-clean pansies. But given Hollywood’s penchant for the epic good-vs-evil theme, it’s not surprising that Batman is one of the most poorly rendered characters of the past 50 years. Michael Keaton’s Batman was somewhat dark, but it’s been all downhill since then. Now, each time a new Batman movie comes out, I somehow drag myself to see it, with increasing reluctance to witness the train wreck of how they’ll butcher the idea completely this time around.

So, yeah, it was a pretty good sign when the movie left me fairly speechless. My friend David had called it a great superhero movie, so I went into it expecting a good superhero movie. To me, this wasn’t at all a superhero movie— Spiderman was a good superhero movie. This movie, in contrast, was just a great drama, and oh, by the way, Batman happened to be in it, towards the end. "This was a good Bruce Wayne movie," David offered, and that’s a lot closer, except that you didn’t even need to care who Bruce Wayne was either. Essentially, this was a great dramatic movie in its own right, which shouldn’t have needed the power of a superhero franchise to get people to see it. I won’t give away any surprises, for those who haven’t yet seen it, but have to comment on the screenplay’s brilliant handling of epic themes. […continued]

Yaaay, my favorite non-driver is blogging again, with new blog colors and some great reasons not to own a car: "Think of all the benefits. I don’t have to pay for a car. Or insurance. Or maintenance. Or gas. Or parking tickets and towing fees." Umm, check, check, check, check, check, and check— all in the last four months for me, in fact. And she didn’t even get to life-altering car accidents in her list.   And if that weren’t enough, adding insult to injury (literally), here’s a quick snapshot of my new all-time highest price at the pump, tonight on the way home. So, $43 and change for about ~300 miles… Ouch!

PS: Spending a few hours at the British Consulate today, I also remembered an article Jen mentioned, about an interesting girl, given my predilection for cute 26-year-old writer types, my proclivity for English accents, and my partiality for Cambridge grads and bloggers. Basically, to the friends, family, and psychologists who insisted my expectations were unrealistic and insane, I leave you with Wesley’s response to Buttercup in the fireswamp. "We’ll never make it," she says… "Nonsense," he shoots back. "You’re only saying that because no one ever has."  

It seems like this blog is perpetually under construction, and I’m pretty much ok with that… This site is as much a fun technology experiment for me as it is a writing outlet. But the state of disrepair here in the past few months has been a bit much even for me. First a reorganization broke the link feeds, and then fixing that broke several other things, and posts haven’t shown up in the past month. Given how ridiculously overboard we are with QA elsewhere, this blog, my spare-time hobby is a another example of where the cobbler’s children have no shoes.  

Anyway, the issues are mostly resolved now, and the missing posts from July are resurrected as well. And with the new laptop, new camera phone, new blogging client, new projects at work, and upcoming London trip, this site should hopefully be more interesting than just drug interaction warnings and PTSD-skewed tv reviews. Oh, changed the sidebar colors too— just a bunch of incremental changes to make my blogging easier for me and hopefully more entertaining for you.  

Finally saw Mr. & Mrs. Smith tonight with my friend David (who’d seen it before and was happy to see it again)… Wow, what a cool movie!  I knew it’d be a great action flick (it’s from the director of The Bourne Supremacy, after all), but I didn’t expect it to be nearly as funny as it was. Really well done, a really great movie overall. At the end of the movie, my first thought was, "Ahhh, now I get it… Angelina Jolie is hot." Sounds bizarre, but I just didn’t see the allure before. Then again, seeing the chemistry between Angelina and Brad, my other thought was, "Ahh, that’s how someone leaves Jennifer Aniston," which seemed pretty insane a few hours earlier too. I know this post is bizarre (and perhaps even seems a bit suspect) given that my friends and colleagues at Citro Studio built the incredible www.mrandmrssmithmovie.com website, and yet, I somehow didn’t get around to seeing the movie till now. Oh well, at least I made it in time to still see it in theaters.  

Unable to sleep Wednesday night with a really ominous sense of uneasiness (the same uneasiness that kept me up all night before the Northridge Earthquake and the 9/11 attacks), I was only partially surprised to see that something bad had indeed happened. But all the preparation in the world wouldn’t make me feel any less angry about an attack on London… easily my favorite city, and a place that I’ve visited several times in the past few years. (Coincidentally, I’d just bought tickets a day earlier for my September trip as well.) My friends, family, and colleagues there are all fine, thankfully; my friend Jonathan pointed out that the damage would’ve been much worse if the attack were an hour earlier, at 7:45AM, when the Underground is far more crowded. There’s not much to add now except that I hope these bastards are caught quickly and harshly. And if I’m this angry about it, I can only imagine what real Londoners feel.

On the lighter side, if one in fact exists, the BBC has a nice piece about blog coverage, with the cool image I’ve copied here and with a few choice quotes that had me laughing out loud. Even in the harshest of times, Brits don’t lose their sense of humor… […continued]

There’s obviously a pretty big culture gap between the "red state" Midwest and "blue state" cities like Los Angeles and New York, and for the most part, especially in today’s political climate, I’m pretty happy (and relieved) to live in a major city where cynicism is alive and well in the general population. Of course, that jaded outlook tends to dull the shimmer of a patriotic holiday like the Fourth of July, and short of a plane trip to a card-carrying red state, I stumbled upon the next best thing… a drive up the coast to the All-American faux-Midwestern town of Santa Maria, California.

Recovering from the recent medical drama (I’m feeling better now btw, completely off Paxil), I needed a break and went up to my mom’s house in Santa Maria to rest for a week or so. After all the recent Michael Jackson news, not many would consider Santa Maria a holiday destination; this sleepy little town peaked in the punchline of a Letterman joke the evening of the verdict… "Not guilty on all counts," Dave said in amazement… "In a related story, Saddam Hussein has requested that his trial be moved to Santa Maria, California." In fairness, most legal commentators credited the jury for insightful analysis and excellent jurisprudence, but c’mon, no one really cares about actual jurisprudence.   As for the people of Santa Maria, they seemed quite happy to be rid of the unwelcome nuisance and international media attention. […continued]

It’s pretty rare for me to write something of no interest to my usual readers, written almost exclusively as data for a Google search. But after spending the past week suffering progressively worse symptoms of potentially-fatal serotonin syndrome, I thought I’d mention something here in the hopes of helping others avoid similar problems. The condition is known to be caused by interactions of two different drugs affecting serotonin levels, and pharmacies are good about watching for such interactions when filling prescriptions. However, do not forget to consider non-prescribed supplements as well.

I’ve been taking Zone Labs OmegaRx fish oil for the past year, with impressive results. The overall improvement in my health and mental concentration has been remarkable, and its benefits in my life have been obvious to all those around me. Then, about two months ago, I had a car accident which resulted in spinal cord damage (thankfully no paralysis, though it wasn’t immediately clear during the seven hours on oxygen in the ER, getting my spine x-rayed from all angles) and a host of other problems treated experimentally with seven medications in as many weeks. It’s been a difficult two months, with one muscle relaxer making me sleep 12-14 hours a night for three weeks, and my ultimately dropping everything and withdrawing from the quarter at UCLA. Last week, they decided I was suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder and prescribed a three-month course of Paxil, a serotonin re-uptake inhibitor, to ease the symptoms. Ironically (and unfortunately, unbeknownst to me), the Zone Labs homepage just happened to have this paragraph featured as well this week:

Taking doses of long-chain Omega-3 fatty acids increase your body’s production of the two neurotransmitters (dopamine and serotonin). Dopamine spurs you to action allowing enhanced concentration by your brain. It allows you to concentrate on the task at hand and organize yourself more efficiently. Serotonin is your morality or "feel good" hormone that gives you a sense of well being and allows you to handle stress more easily.

It’s all too easy to forget that unprescribed supplements can significantly affect your body chemistry, and in fact, I would suggest from my experience in the past year that Omega-3 fish oils are one of the most powerful and most amazing drugs you can take. […continued]

Amazing how quickly time flies! Today marks the one year anniversary of stanforth.org (and 3.5 years since my original js.mobthought.com blog), and it’s been a fun and incredibly educational experience. Slowly but surely, largely through trial and error, I found a blogging style that works for me— not writing as often as I’d like, but hopefully saying something interesting when I do. Thank you so very much to you readers; I’ve learned an incredible amount from your feedback.

In fact, based on comments in the past year, I’ve got a long list of things I’d like to fix or improve on this site, and to celebrate the anniversary (and to avoid the usual never-ending delays of most development projects), I decided to roll out these changes incrementally over the next few months, starting today with a little spring cleaning and a fresh coat of CSS paint. Those who are interested can read more details here, but for most of you, a few general notes will probably suffice:

• Please note: My RSS feeds have changed! Instead of three feeds (one per section, with no links), there are now seven feeds— three for the section posts, three for the section links, and one "full" feed with posts (but not links) from all three sections. Please see the updated syndication page for more information, and I apologize if this causes any problems. (i.e., since two URLs pointed to the Worldview feed, some users may now be inadvertently subscribed to the full feed.) […continued]

When I was a kid, we had so many crazy futuristic ideas, the things we’d build with thousands of connected BBS’s in a global network (our "Compudynamica Data Retrieval System," we called it). The over-hyped dot-com demo’s in the 1990s seemed mundane and underwhelming compared to our imaginations a decade earlier.

Fast forward to this week. As much as I hate to admit it, I really dig The O.C. and this week’s season finale was incredible. The 28-year-old creator/writer is an absolute genius— who else writes an episode joking with a guest star about her new show and referencing (incorrect) fan speculation about the episode itself?? Awesome. Not to mention, the last scene should win an Emmy for editing alone— 40+ perspective changes within a minute, with amazingly-perfect music too. Resigning myself to the sad realization that my inner child is apparently a 13-year-old girl, I thought: "I must have that song." So, of course, like any normal 13-year-old, I just Google’d the lyrics, found the artist in London from the lyrics on her blog, and downloaded the single (from an unreleased CD) for 99 cents from the iTunes Store. Of course. It all seems so obvious, so commonplace.

Wow, not quite sure when this happened, but apparently the 21st century is here after all… with trackerless torrents and opening-day movie downloads. It seems like a million years ago (1993?), back at UCLA, when Jurassic Park finished at 11:55pm at the Avco on Wilshire and we literally ran a couple blocks to Tower before they closed at midnight, just so we could buy the soundtrack CD. Dinosaurs indeed. No Google, no blogs, no iTunes. Uphill, both ways, in the snow.

After five years of Tivo, you can imagine how few commercials I actually see anymore. But 10-second-rewind is also great for those "Wait— what??" moments when you do see a commercial worth watching. Tonight’s rare moment was the commercial for the new Dodge Charger. Wow, there’s a blast from the past. Ford’s doing well enough with their new Mustang that Chrysler wanted in on that action. The car looks cool, and that’s even before I saw the numbers: 420hp hemi?? Seriously? And I thought the 300hp Acura RL was impressive last week.

Reminded me of the first car I ever wanted— you never forget your first. I was five years old, and my mom used to pay me a whole penny for each snail that I caught in the garden (this being the 1970s and child labor being cheaper, safer, and more educational than poisons scattered in the yard). I was up to about $0.28 or so, and already planning way ahead. So I went to the kitchen, where mom and dad were talking, and offered dad $1.00 — one whole dollar!! — for his shiny blue 1968 Dodge Charger. (With 17 feet of solid steel and a 383 under the hood, dad used to joke, "It’ll pass anything on the road but a gas station.") Of course, he laughed out loud at my very serious offer, in that way that parents do when they pat their endearing little kids on the head, but I totally didn’t get the joke. It’s worth more? Ok, how much? Five dollars? "A little more than that," he said with a grin. Fast forward a few years and I might have to up my original offer for the 1968 Charger by about 40,000x for a 2008. Wow… that’s a lot of snails.

PS: The new orange model should be in the new Dukes of Hazard movie! Jessica Simpson as Daisy Duke + one of these as the new General Lee == best remake movie ever…. well, at least until Bewitched.  

Dave kicked off a new decade today with a great West Wing parable, about Ainsley Hayes’ first day on the job in the White House. "The point of this story," writes Dave, "I feel like the Republican consultant. You guys weren’t supposed to do what I told you to do! I was just having an opinion." What a great moral from a guy whose standards and creations, like RSS and XML-RPC, underlie so many diverse systems, from so many companies, used by millions of people who never knew Dave’s role.

Happy 50th, Dave, and here’s to several more decades of your great opinions…  

Smoke rises! Pope Benedict XVI has been chosen. Nice juxtaposition with John Paul here… John Paul was 58 when elected; Benedict is 78. John Paul was progressive; Benedict is a hard-liner. John Paul was a steel worker who suffered with Polish Solidarity; Benedict was in Hitler’s Nazi youth program and Nazi air force. Ahh, it’s the little differences that make life interesting. This is just begging for a five-minute rant at Eddie Izzard’s next show.

Update: This article talks about how the new pope is keeping up with the times… 1997, the time before spam, apparently.

But the Vatican also showed that Benedict intends to follow in the footsteps of John Paul’s multimedia ministry. It modified its Web site so that users who click on an icon on the home page automatically activate an e-mail composer with Benedict’s address. In English, the address is benedictxvi(at)vatican.va.

Wow, how much spam is he going to get now? I suspect most of his Inbox will be filled with rather pointless offers for someone who’s taken a vow of celibacy. Not to mention, if this guy got jail time for spamming, it seems reasonable that spamming the pope sends you straight to hell. If Benedict really wants to get with the times, he could issue a papal order condemning all spammers to hell.  

It’s a foregone conclusion that nearly all long-running (non-animated) television shows will swap out characters over time, but rarely do you get such clear transitions as the four-year election cycles naturally lend a show like The West Wing. Instead, with a show like ER (which I often use as a comparison since West Wing creator Aaron Sorkin’s departure a few years ago turned The West Wing into a political version of ER), you have random, sporadic replacements until you turn on the television one day a few years later and can’t quite put your finger on why the show seems so lame.

The West Wing, in contrast, couches its succession planning in storylines about the next Presidential election, and Wednesday’s season finale was a great succession episode— one of several great episodes recently. Like Dave, I’ve been really enjoying the election side of the show while really not caring much about the White House side anymore… almost the same thing that happened last year when the once-glorious Practice devolved into a tired existing practice I just Tivo-forwarded through, and an irreverent new practice which got its own show as Boston Legal this year (and, as a bonus, got advertised as "the only new show with two Emmy-award winning characters," since both James Spader and William Shatner won awards for their half of The Practice.) Similarly, next season really brings us a West Wing "spin-off" without the hassle of creating a new show. West Wing 2.0, the inevitable Santos-McGarry administration, gives the show an opportunity to recapture some of the luster it’s lost since Sorkin left. […continued]

A few months ago, I started reading Jawaharlal Nehru’s The Discovery of India, a book about one man’s journey throughout India to discover the nature and potential of its people, and it really struck a chord with me personally. It inspired me to rethink ideas of life and career and long-term impact. I wish I could recommend the experience to others, except that I can’t possibly know what books might reach others as dramatically as this book has affected me. Written by the first prime minister of India, a brilliant Cambridge-educated attorney, the book shares also insights that one might not expect from a world leader.

Someone said the other day: death is the birthright of every person born— a curious way of putting an obvious thing. It is a birthright which nobody has denied or can deny, and which all of us seek to forget and escape so long as we may. And yet there was something novel and attractive about the phrase. Those who complain so bitterly of life have always a way out of it, if they so choose. That is always in our power to achieve. If we cannot master life we can at least master death. A pleasing thought lessening the feeling of helplessness.

If I’d read this book at twelve, it probably would have condensed eighteen years of chaotic self-discovery down to a pleasant few years of adolescence. Instead of merely defining myself in negation (that is, I didn’t know what I wanted, but knew I didn’t want my parents’ agenda), this would have provided a solid example to use as a starting point in crafting my own life, sparing me years of trial-and-error. Even more annoying, I spent that summer (at twelve) in Bombay, even sporting an outfit just like the one pictured ("he looks like a young Nehru," my dear grandmother said proudly), while my grandfather’s copy of Discovery of India, one of his favorite books, sat untouched on a shelf a few feet away. Fate, it seems, is not without a sense of irony.

I’ve been busy juggling several fun projects lately and definitely have several back-logged news items to blog about at some point soon. But this story from the AP’s technology section about the low cost of entry into the new venture space— something I’ve been focused on for the past decade— is too good to wait.

[The VC’s inability to find $100m dot-com type ventures] doesn’t mean that there is no smart new technology to wow consumers. It’s just that people are finding more efficient ways to do it.

Maybe that’s because it has never been easier to create potent technology hybrids that mix-and-match hardware components, use a bit of borrowed software code, and require only a few thousand dollars of investment.

Very cool to see this becoming more widely known. As mentioned, I’ve been focused on this for some time and it’s the area with the greatest potential for small business developers in the post-2001 era. Sure, there will be companies which go the VC route and IPO at 10x investment within a couple years, but those will be the exception rather than the rule. My hope, in fact, is that the new model allows small business developers to ignore the VC route and to instead build long-term, sustainable businesses which they are proud to run for a decade or more. In fact, that’s the premise behind the venture development firm JSL Dragonfly, which we started in 2001, and which uses a solid open-source technology platform to build new ventures quickly and efficiently. We should hopefully see some interesting announcements from them this year. […continued]

Another data point in my recent questions about collective consciousness… Science Blog points to a brain study suggesting a sort of "sixth sense" in people. […continued]

Some interesting results from a recent study on why people overcommit in their time estimates. It’s not shocking to see people demonstrate more difficulty evaluating intangible resources like time vs. tangible resources like money, but still interesting to observe. […continued]

This article about random number generators, if anywhere near accurate (and assuming the phenomenon isn’t a hoax), is one of the coolest articles I’ve ever seen. I happened to be discussing something similar with a friend on Saturday, about how I don’t hold religious beliefs opposing science but still feel a freedom to believe the unprovable until science proves otherwise. (Ultimately for me, the point is about how the belief impacts me— does it help me live a better life? does it make me a better human being? The problem with religions, in my view, is that some provide excuses to rationalize violations of basic human ethics.) […continued]

As tonight’s episode of The West Wing began and Toby introduced "Professor Lawrence Lessig" (played by Christopher Lloyd) to the President (played by Martin Sheen), I haphazardly thought, "Hmm, that’s a weird coincidence… They should’ve done a little more research before picking a real professor’s name. A few seconds later, when the President asks, "Professor Lessig? The Future of Ideas? that Professor Lessig?"… I suddenly found myself sitting up and paying attention. Wow! This was the same Professor Lessig I met (along with a few hundred others) at Stanford in November! Overall, it was really well done, especially focusing on a very important aspect of constiutional law (something I was very interested in at one point, taking ConLaw courses in at UCLA, thinking of going into constitutional law myself). […continued]

Growing up in California — and born in Los Angeles, self-proclaimed flagship of Western culture, at that — I’ve always had an inherently dismissive view of Indian culture. It’s all too easy to see only pictures of starving beggar children in the streets and forget in one fell swoop all majesty of thousands of years of civilized culture. Not surprising then, as with most narrow-minded mistakes of youth, that I’ve come to realize in more recent years the ignorance of such summary judgements. (Of course now we have blog archives to record our own ignorant jabs at Hinduism for posterity. Great.) Anyway, while the "Intelligent Design" commotion has focused on the things that ancient wisdoms got wrong (in my opinion), I’m more impressed to see the things some of them got right. […continued]

Emailing a company this week about an interesting work project got me thinking about some really interesting side effects of blogging transparency that I previously hadn’t considered. After my email to them yesterday, I received a fast response with a surprisingly-cool closing line: "Besides, I’m always interested in meeting another Eddie Izzard fan." How’d they?!— I started, before remembering my post about an Eddie Izzard show a few months ago. Interesting. […continued]

Hi folks… My posting here has been rather sparse lately, hasn’t it? [Still sparse even after bringing back missing posts like this one from a rendering bug.] But despite the low frequency of posting, this new year of 2005 has gotten off to a great start, with good progress and interesting work at Scalara.org, on the non-profit Tollana project, on a couple new PHP sites, and even — oh, by the way — in returning to UCLA for an economics degree. I’m really enjoying the diversity of projects and have been talking to a few people about even more interesting projects soon too.

But with the Iraqi elections yesterday, the fevered pitch of "expert" punditry was irritating enough to remind I had a blog. I mean, it’s cost the US about $200 billion, so the least I can offer is my $0.02, right? […continued]